Pokemon GO Monsters Will Need a Permit to Enter State Parks in Milwaukee

[Lodum]

Hey, that's my city, and the park I played Pokemon Go at a few times. Let's give some perspective here.

Lake Park (the cause of all of this) was pretty crazy. Overall, the city didn't have too-too many PokeStops (for a city). It was groundbreaking at first to be exploring and find a place where there were 3 Stops even close to each other. Lake Park, though... that was crazy. It's full of Memorial Benches, dedicated to this or that other person, and every single one of them was a stop. Enough stops that you were actively walking around and spinning stops all the time. Word got out pretty quickly.

In the "prime" of Pokemon Go -- an event I doubt we'll see again, honestly -- there was good reason to look into this. When our group first discovered the area, there were literally hundreds of people in this single park. The amount of use the park saw was in-fucking-sane. In mere weeks, the grass around the paved track was gone and now dirt. A new dirt path formed that cut through a field with a few stops on it. People would yell about some rare 'mon, and there would be a literal stampede of people trying to rush over there and find it. I didn't personally see a ton of litter, but there were already significantly more trashcans, and the park system was apparently using a prison-work detail to keep it clean on off hours. Numerous port-a-johns were added, and I'm not sure I want to know why.

People came from everywhere in the city and nearby areas to play here and I completely understand it being above and beyond any sort of expected park use. The streets were lined with cars, parking and driving on the road was a nightmare, and large groups of people were now walking in front of people's houses. I'm sure the vast majority of them were respectful of people's yards, but even one fucking that up will ruin the whole group. (As a side note, this is the nice area of town, with very very very very nice houses. I'm sure that factors in)

I think the actual legislation is an overstep, but I definitely see the reason for it. Pokemon Go, for a time, destroyed this park.

Ok so what you describe is problem with low personal culture of people that gathered not problem with thing that got out of the house and into the park. Unless there's some different reasons in USA, here parks are for the people and people are encouraged to come there in numbers. If the grass was trampled it was either poorly groomed, not a good type or not rooted yet. I get that there are plants and parts of the parks which shouldn't supposed to be walked on by people but that's what are park wardens/security/whoever is responsible for park for. If there is too much interest - you organize an event hire extra man and put up booths to sell tickets and control how many people are in and what they do. In worst case scenario you have money to fix what you couldn't protect.

To me it looks like lazy and lousy legislation, covering up incompetence and what's worse going against public interest. Not a sign of good governance on any level.



However what you mentioned - unevenly spread stops. They could have easily work with Niantic to change layout of them or even buy few licences and organise pokemon related events away from that particular place but 'lure' in people somewhere else. Question is if you do have anything like that in the first place or local authorities just have the park and that's that, work done, no other public leasure place available.

Right, but the park department only has so much money to take care of the park and it's already recently got several new trees planted, a lot of resodding grass, repairs to a large stone bridge among other things done before Go was a thing. The idea of the license would be to recoup money that would need to be spent on extra work because of the insane amount of traffic, I don't imagine the parks department budget is exactly overflowing.

Either way, they removed a lot of the stops in what seems to be an attempt to even it out, but I'm not expecting one company to really track every single city like that. Hopefully they just improved the automated system, and have checks in to flag places that might need to be manually verified. That, and the fact no one gives a rat's ass about Pokemon Go anymore, means it probably won't be a problem. But, to the political people, it's probably not a bad idea to have a rule on the books before it happens again.